“No,” I said, before they could even finish, “because isn’t Real Housewives a little bougey for you and your, like, radical anarchy?”
“Real Housewives is anarchy,” Chris said, throwing their body down in a plastic chair across from mine and grabbing a clementine from a tangled mesh bag the Wendys had given their employees for Christmas. “Where else do you get to see skinny white girls punching each other on TV?”
“Good point,” I said. What I didn’t say was that I knew Ellen, that one might even say I knew her well, if you counted conspiring to commit assault and battery together. No one at Wendys’s knew about my former life, unless they googled me, but I’d deleted all my social media accounts and shied away from hanging out with any coworkers besides Chris. I felt safe around Chris, unlike with most new people. Which I think is always true with people whom you can look straight in the eye and see at once that they, too, have traveled out to the edge of things; perhaps even, or more likely, way farther out than you.
Anyway, Ellen and I hadn’t talked much since I’d been fired. I don’t think she put it together that the guy who’d posted the video of me was the same guy who her fuckboy Barry had beat up, and I didn’t want to subject her to my inferno. Ben had actually called, too, sometime in that first week, but I didn’t call him back, either. Or my mother. I couldn’t bear it. I wanted only to take refuge in books and Lindsey and Susan and my new friend Chris, whose laughter in the break room was like a lit match to my extinguished heart-fire.
Minds and hearts are fragile things, you know. I lost both of mine for a little while. Only the special people, the special books—the ones that remind you that, though, yes, you died before, you can still come alive again—help you find them.
As for those other people, the less-special ones—well, I had figured I’d just hide from them till the end of time.
But then again—Ellen, coming to the store. It would be worth not-hiding for just one of her huge and overperfumed hugs.
“Why are you smiling like that?” Chris said. “You look crazy.”
“Nothing? I’m just—” I smiled wider, then put my hands to my cheeks. “I think I might actually be happy.”
Chris looked at me like there was a pile of screws falling out of my ears. “Uh yeah, you should be happy,” they said, jazzing their hands only half-ironically. “It’s the HOLLIIIDDAAAYYYSS!”
* * *
—
On my bus ride home, we passed through a pedestrian shopping district. I stared through the dark into department store windows trimmed with fake snow and fake evergreens and fake bodies draped with down and wool and cashmere. I passed an Encore with full-bodied mannequins dressed in full-coverage lingerie, accompanied by two large posters. The first one said be merry! And the other one was a tag that I just knew Mary London had written, even though it was unattributed: keep your friends and your breasts close this season. No one at Encore was clever enough to come up with something like that without Mary at the helm.
I trundled off the bus along with a whole bunch of other people, people who looked different from me, people I hadn’t had to be around when I’d driven around in my car all the time, insulated by layers of metal and glass. I had begun to find it comforting, this anonymous, liminal community, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with other bodies. Some days it was the only touch I received. My phone buzzed with a text from Susan. What are you up to tonight, muffin?
Gettin busy, I’d written back, with my lover, Mr. TV
You want to make it a threesome?
I smiled. Foursome. I’ll text Lindsey.
* * *
—
During a commercial break, after a particularly exciting sequence in The Bachelorette where the heroine got to take a hot air balloon ride with one of her honeys, Lindsey muted the TV. “We need to catch up,” she said earnestly. “Susan, I want to hear about what’s happening with your book! I keep forgetting to ask you about it.”
The three of us were drinking wine and eating cheese and crackers on Lindsey’s matching sofa and loveseat, which were beige suede and had had no stains right up to the night I’d laid out like a corpse and fallen asleep watching Pride and Prejudice with a bag of peanut butter M&M’S. Lindsey had out a bevy of pillows and blankets for us; her living room was like a marshmallow world. In answer to Lindsey’s question Susan smiled, a small smile, like she’d been keeping some pleasure a secret for a long time and was slowly getting used to revealing it in public.
“I knew it!” I said when I saw that smile. “You’re not forgetting, she’s just shy. But I think it’s going well,” I told Lindsey.
“I can tell,” Lindsey said, smiling back. She brushed a hair back from her face and her bangles clicked. “I finished The House of Mirth, by the way. Did you?”
“I did!” I said. Susan had given me her copy the last time she came over, said she thought it “might be useful.” Lindsey, inspired, had bought her own copy on her Kindle immediately. “First meeting of the Red Tent Book Club!” she’d said, maybe a little too excitedly for Susan, who, with her terror of organized anything, saw the distance between social clubs and neo-Nazism as perilously small.
I said, “Um, Susan, I’m not sure how long it’s been since you read it but—you know she dies in the end, right?”
The “she” I was referring to was Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth who gets kicked out of her tony New York City social milieu after false accusations of an affair and dies penniless in a boarding house. The parallels, if you wanted to see them, were there.
“I know,” Susan said, leaning forward, elbows on her knees. “But she dies honestly—”
“She’s still dead!” I said, just as Lindsey was saying, “But she died finally admitting she loved Lawrence! And Lawrence loved her too!”
“—and her death is the final nail in the coffin,” Susan said, using her index finger, as she always did, when she knew she was making a good point, “for Wharton to show the cowardice of upper class morality and the bullshit falsity of bourgeois—”
“If only he would have gotten there in time,” Lindsey said wistfully.
I was surprised to feel that I was smiling again, for what must have been a record twice in one day. How strange, this smile. How incongruous. Because I didn’t really know how to be a person anymore, didn’t really know much of anything.
And yet.
Sometimes I was just…fine.
Sometimes I even felt a boundless love in my heart.
Sometimes.
As I continued to pat my cheeks in wonderment, Susan and Lindsey entered into a very gentle argument—the only kind of argument Lindsey, as a self-described “highly sensitive person” could handle—about whether or not The House of Mirth was a love story. Susan maintained it was a social satire; Lindsey kept saying, “But the chemistry!” I listened for a while, continuing to smile at my friends, at how sweet they both were.
“That reminds me,” Lindsey said after a while, seemingly out of nowhere. She turned to me. “Have you talked to Ben?”
“What? Oh—no.” I shrugged casually. Very casually. “He called, like, right after all that…” I waved a hand. “But I didn’t call him back.”
“And why not?” Susan said pointedly.
“It’s nice that he called,” Lindsey offered.
“Did he leave a message?” said Susan.
“No,” I said. “Which is why I didn’t call back.”
“You should call him back,” Susan said. “She’s not going to call him back,” she said to Lindsey.
“She might!” Lindsey said.
“You guys, I can hear you!” I pointed to my chest. “I am literally right here!”
“She’s afraid,” Susan said to Lindsey, as if I hadn’t said anything. “Which is understandable. But she’s going to have to stop being afraid sometime. Don’t you
think?”
The day of Ellen’s reading I was scheduled to close the store, but I asked a fellow seasonal employee to trade my closing shift for her opener on the condition that I hard-clean the bathrooms at the end of mine, so that she’d only have to spot clean at the end of hers. A not-insubstantial concession, seeing as our restrooms were unpotpourried and open to the public.
Let me tell you, it’s a special feeling, scrubbing toilets used merely as approximations a mere forty-five minutes before meeting up with a minor celebrity friend with whom you’ve previously drunk Numb Cappuccinos! By the time I was done, I had toilet scum on my knees and sweat under my arms, and I hadn’t thought to bring a change of clothes.
While I cleaned, Chris, along with several other employees, had been charged with setting up the event area for Ellen’s reading. We were expecting a full house. There was a table stacked high with copies of Ellen’s memoir, All Real. The title was, of course, the same tagline that we’d come up with for her personal brand campaign, and the cover-sized close-up of her face was the same photograph Lindsey had spent countless hours photoshopping. Seeing my team’s work in this completed, public form brought on a surge of pride that existed simultaneously alongside a more familiar sense of loss.
The book had been included in a “Holiday Gift Ideas!” segment on our CBS affiliate’s early morning show and written up in the local paper. By six-thirty there were already thirty people milling around for the seven P.M. proceedings, the literary equivalent of a sold-out stadium. Someone had brought a case of Ellen’s fitness water, Ellian!, and samples of her nitrate-free beef sticks, Hankfurters!, for the event, and I grabbed one of each on my way to confab with Chris, who was wearing a headset and directing the other employees with the high-octane duress of a stage manager at the Emmys.
“AV?” Chris was barking into the foam microphone strapped across their cheek as I approached. “AV, do you copy?…yeah, ALEX, I’m talking to you. Who else would I be talking to? We’re gonna need to cut down on the reverb up here, do you copy?”
“Hello, commander,” I said, giving them a hug. “Can I help with anything? Also, do I smell like toilet-bowl cleaner?”
“What? Oh God, yes, you do,” Chris said, pulling away. “And no, it’s too late. This is a disaster. The show starts in twenty minutes and our star is LITERALLY nowhere to be found.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that we were not at a show, we were at a reading at a local bookstore, because Chris was enjoying the hell out of playing their role as a distressed general, and I felt it only right that I indulge them. “That is LITERALLY crazy,” I said.
“RIGHT?! If she’s not here in five I’m LITERALLY calling the police.” Chris pushed the foam mic closer to their mouth. “What’d you say, Alex?…You what?…Are you KIDDING ME right now?!”
“Listen.” I put a hand on Chris’s arm. “I know this might not be the best, you know, timing”—at that Chris began preparing to look affronted—“but I thought you should know before she gets here that I kinda know Ellen. Well, not kinda. I mean, I do know her. From the old days. Before the fire.”
That’s how Chris and I had decided to refer to my humiliation: the fire. We’d gone out for drinks one night, and I’d told them briefly about Julian and Wolf and Celeste and Las Vegas. It was still hard to talk about; I winced the whole time, but I’d gotten out the most important details. “I knew you looked familiar!” Chris had said, unfazed and with a big smile after I’d finished, smacking me on the arm. “I was like, didn’t I see that girl on Giphy?”
I continued. “Don’t worry, she’ll be here, she’s never missed an appearance in her life. I think you guys are gonna hit it off great, but if you see us talking just—be cool, all right? Don’t like tackle her from behind or anything. Ellen’s fear-aggressive.”
Chris put their hands on their hips and looked at me exasperatedly. “What is wrong with you?! You waited until RIGHT NOW to tell me you know Ellen Hanks?”
I threw up my hands. “I didn’t know when to bring it up!”
“What?” Chris spoke into their headpiece. “Okay, DON’T MOVE. I’m coming.” To me: “Maybe one of the million times I was telling you what I’d read on Us Weekly dot com, for one thing!”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry!” I felt stupid and unnecessarily secretive. Now that I was free from the subterfuge of Nanü and PR, I especially hated keeping secrets. “I have issues!”
Chris and I had bonded that night at that bar over our shared issues. At one point they’d said, “You know, if I were an animal? I’d probably be one of those rescue dogs that’ll never trust a man no matter how long he’s lived with his happy suburban family,” and I’d laughed until I cried.
“Don’t apologize, just make her come out for drinks with us!” Chris called back to me as they hustled to fix whatever mess Alex had made.
I took a seat in the second row, on the far side, so I could catch Ellen’s eye without appearing too desperate. I was afraid of that a lot those days, appearing desperate. Or, really, appearing anything. Over the months I’d started wearing hats and clothes that had less shape. I made little eye contact; I had not wanted to be seen by anybody. Not just because I was still paranoid that people would recognize my face. I just didn’t want eyes on me. My skin, my face. I could not bear eyes on me yet. I was afraid of what they might find if they looked. The seats were slowly filling in around me with various sizes and shapes of humans, and it wouldn’t have been impossible for me to lean behind, in front, or to the side to say hello, how are you, how’s your day going—the sort of thing I’d always done with strangers, my whole life, curious creature that I was.
But I didn’t. I had lost that part of myself. It had died. Likely people had forgotten about me, if they’d ever thought of me at all beyond five seconds of my face on a screen or my name as a punch line. But I hadn’t forgotten. I still haven’t forgotten.
That’s why I’ve had to put this all down.
Every morning when I woke up, for a brief moment, I thought to myself: perhaps this is the day when I stop feeling ashamed. But then I would swing my legs over to the side of the bed and the shame would return, a dense cloud inside my skull. Occasionally, over the course of the day, the fog would clear, for a second or two—when I was reading, or if I encountered beauty out in the world—and I would catch a glimpse of this enormous landscape of freedom. I would think, this is what your whole life can feel like, each moment, if you can just accept everything that has ever—but then as soon as I began to finish this thought the fog would start to roll back in.
I’d become accustomed to the fog over the past three months; I’d forgotten that a world existed beyond the fog, that there were thousands of miles of different altitudes and climes. So I curled into myself while I waited for Ellen to appear. Because I was afraid of the Internet, I didn’t take out my phone. I just sat there, small and quiet. I’d lost weight in the past months, but not in a fun way. There were lines on my face and an expression behind my eyes that I did not like. I avoided mirrors as much as I could.
Oh well. It was, I counseled myself, fine to be alone. Because, I counseled myself, alone is what we always are. Even, I counseled myself, when we pretend otherwise.
“Move your jacket, will you?” a familiar voice said.
I looked up. Susan was standing at the end of the row, her puffy coat gathered in her arms. Her long hair was brushed, her eyes clear. She looked playful and happy.
I did a double take. “What’re you doing here?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing here?” she handed me my coat and purse before sitting down next to me. She placed a still-cold-from-the-outdoors hand on my back. “Do you really think I’d let you come face-to-face with your former life by yourself?”
“Oh—for crying out loud!” I reached over and gave her a hug. We laid our heads on each other’s shoulders. I hadn’t asked her to come
because I’d been embarrassed. Because it’s so embarrassing to ask for help. Because it’s so embarrassing to be helpless. This despite the fact that when we see our friends helpless, we feel such a great rush of tenderness.
But Susan, she knew to help me anyway. I didn’t even have to ask.
“Thank you.”
She lifted her head and reached for her purse. “Gum?” she said, taking out a foil-wrapped stick.
“Sure.” I plucked one from the minty envelope.
“I quit smoking,” she said, breaking the sugar-dusty green stick in half before popping it in her mouth. “As of yesterday. Which is good, but it means I’ve chewed like ten packs of gum between now and then. I’m going to end up one of those cadavers with a ten pound wad in her stomach.”
“Whatever! Still counts as progress.” I chewed. “Speaking of progress, as of yesterday, I decided to quit feeling sorry for myself and have entered, like, a deep period of misanthropy instead.”
She laughed. “That is progress!”
Then I laughed. “I hate,” I said, laughing, “everybody.” This made her laugh some more, and then I laughed some more, and I could feel some of the poison in me exit into the atmosphere, high up in the sky where it couldn’t hurt anyone.
“Ahhhhhhh,” Susan said, stretching her arms out wide. “Life. La vie.”
“It’ll kill you, I’ll tell you what.”
She put her head back on my shoulder, and I rested mine on hers. We sat like that for a while. Time stopped being linear and became a series of moments that stacked on top of each other like translucent building blocks. I was snuggling into my mother’s chest, my best friend from kindergarten was hugging me so hard I could barely breathe, I was at the movies, folded into the first boy I’d ever fallen in love with, I was standing over a riverside cliff with Susan looking at a sunset when we were nineteen, I was alone in the pinewoods behind my parents’ house naming trees (you are a birch, you are a maple) and finding solace in their company. It was the very opposite feeling of what had happened in the aftermath of Celeste and Wolf and Julian, when I’d fallen into a sinkhole, which bottomed out into other sinkholes, comprised of every bad memory I’d had and some I hadn’t even known existed: memories of punishment and correction, moments of neglect and abandonment.
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 26
